Twitter is currently buzzing about the death of Dennis Ritchie, the visionary creator of UNIX and C, among other things. We hope it's just a false rumor. Story developing, we will be updating. Update: Unfortunately, it seems to be confirmed. Rob Pike, co-creator of the Plan 9 and Inferno OSes, who has worked with Ritchie in the past, and he's currently working for Google's GO language, posted this.

We are comparing Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs for the arbitrary reason they died at almost the same time - this is a mistake.

I know as a Linux and a FreeBSD user and a computer user that I am very grateful for the contributions of Dennis Ritchie. I hope it is comfort to his family that so many people are grateful for his contributions to computing.

In all likelihood, Jobs will be virtually forgotten twenty years from now. A hundred years from now, Ritchie will be remembered. The reason is simple: historians have a tendency to choose the significant figures and ignore the rest. Ritchie was a significant figure because he helped to define programming languages and operating systems. In effect, he was a 'nation builder.' Yet Jobs was more of a pop culture icon. His real contributions were in the 1970's and 1980's when he helped to build a business that popularized computers. But the reality is that there were hundreds of people waiting to step up and take his place. You can't say the same thing for Ritchie.

In all likelihood, Jobs will be virtually forgotten twenty years from now. A hundred years from now, Ritchie will be remembered. The reason is simple: historians have a tendency to choose the significant figures and ignore the rest. Ritchie was a significant figure because he helped to define programming languages and operating systems. In effect, he was a 'nation builder.' Yet Jobs was more of a pop culture icon. His real contributions were in the 1970's and 1980's when he helped to build a business that popularized computers. But the reality is that there were hundreds of people waiting to step up and take his place. You can't say the same thing for Ritchie.

It makes sense.

There are lot of big business men back in the 19th century. Who remembers them? No one. But many have heard about Cantor (19th), Einstein (20th century), etc. The scientists.

Who know about big business 2000 years ago? Who know about Pythagoras who lived 2000 years ago?

If you discover a new important scientific discovery, you will be remembered even 1000s of years later.

Only time will tell how history judges these two men, and personally I find it difficult to judge the comparative contributions of the two.

My feeling is that you are undervaluing the contributions that Jobs made. Whilst they began in the 70s and 80s, they continued through right up until he died. The value of bringing easy to use, high technology, mass-market products like the Apple ][, Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad to the market should not be underestimated. In virtually every one of those product examples the prevailing wisdom was that it couldn't be done.

In contrast Ritchie's contributions of C and UNIX were done before Steve Jobs' career began. Their value is not to be underestimated, since they serve as valuable foundations for much of what has followed.

Whilst you say that there were others waiting to step up and take the place of Jobs at his rise, the same can also be said of Ritchie. Sure, the industry was younger with less people involved so fewer could have taken his place, but there were other languages besides C, and Ritchie was one member of a team that produced Unix.

Let's face it - neither man is really well known outside of geeky circles. There are plenty of people, even those that own iPhones, that didn't know who Steve Jobs was. Far fewer people have heard of Dennis Ritchie - it is only geeks that have heard of him, and most only know him because his name is on the cover of the C book.

The fact is that both men have their place. They will both be missed. This is not a competition.

In all likelihood, Jobs will be virtually forgotten twenty years from now. A hundred years from now, Ritchie will be remembered. The reason is simple: historians have a tendency to choose the significant figures and ignore the rest. Ritchie was a significant figure because he helped to define programming languages and operating systems. In effect, he was a 'nation builder.' Yet Jobs was more of a pop culture icon. His real contributions were in the 1970's and 1980's when he helped to build a business that popularized computers. But the reality is that there were hundreds of people waiting to step up and take his place. You can't say the same thing for Ritchie.

That comment was true for a time when education was a luxury so records were kept by the learned.

However these days everything we say is recorded and saved. So the millions of transcripts from the masses echoing Steve Jobs's name will totally drown the few tributes to Dennis Ritchie from us geeks.

I think that you will find it equally true today. Every age creates far more information that it can handle. A lot of that information ends up destroyed. A lot more ends up being ignored by future generations.

What matters though is what we choose to pass on to successive generations. I think that Ritchie has a real opportunity to be passed on no matter how obscure he may be today. Perhaps it will only be in textbooks of the trade, but that is something. And it will be because he contributed to foundational knowledge.

Jobs is certainly a bigger figure today, and he made some big contributions. But those contributions were in the 80's when Apple was first on the scene and defined markets. So if Jobs is remembered, and I think that is a big if, it will be as part of Jobs & Wozniak. (The same goes for Woz, alas. If he's remembered it will be as Jobs & Wozniak too.)

I saw one post comparing the death of Mr Jobs to the death of President Kennedy.

A man who has had cancer for a decade and was really good at selling blinky lights and branding compared to a US president who died suddenly and violently infront of millions of whitnesses and who's murder never has been fully solved.

You want to talk about blowing things out of preportion.

Yeah, stadly, this is just the passing of someone who gave us modern computing and one of the most popular programming languages.. no biggie..

I'm not quite sure why it would "completely dwarf, in importance and significance, the story about Steve Jobs" (emphasis mine)

The momentum of stories about people, the significance attributed to them, depends largely on how much their subjects are visible to the public - which is clearly much more for Steve Jobs than it is for Dennis Ritchie.
And as for importance, also "UNIX + C is /big/" - well, it absolutely is, but... it's not like it depends in any way on the work, on the continuing existence of its creators at this point; it hasn't for a long time. More generally: people die, with males at ~70 having rather large probability of that, per unit of time.

It's sad if it's true, and we should remember his accomplishments (always, not only on such occasions; if "only" because they point out the conditions of fruitful environments, realizing which should be useful in shaping the future). But... well, too bad I'll probably be long dead before people get some perspective about the dead (especially considering how humans seem to succumb more into "grief porn", lately http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mourning_sickness )

Your knowledge of tech history is very limited, and clearly flat out wrong in this: C for microcomputers came well after either Apple or Microsoft was founded, and had no meaningful impact on the formation of either one: they (Apple and Microsoft) had no meaningful usage of C until many years after each was founded and successful, and other than their respective dives into their own Unix or similar OSes, C wasn't used by them at all: the machines they worked with had way too little RAM. MacOS and DOS were written mostly in assembly: the 8-bit OSes (other than Apple's UCSD Pascal system) were, definitely before the later CP/M mutants. C was way too much of a hog for native compiling in a sane way. Both Windows and MacOS (not OSX) had a lot of Pascal heritage before changing over to C-based languages as their major basis.

C has been very influential, sure, but did not make or break either Microsoft or Apple, though both have heavily used C and derivatives once they switched, to their benefit, with all the warts C has and all (seriously, it's such a very loose "standard" in so many ways).

BeOS is quite indebted to Unix (and C++ to C), and Copland never even reached Alpha status. Of course, this kind of alternate history is a bit rubbish anyway, since Jobs might have based Next on some alternate-history descendent of the system that gained popularity in the absence of Unix. It's not like there wouldn't be something else out there.

My idea was to point out how much Apple's current success builds on the work of Ritchie, but I phrased it wrong.

Ehmmm. C and UNIX were born at the very first 70's, and the modern home computers apperaed at the late 70's - Altair was very good but it was for computer enthusiasts -...

Many of the first microcomputer and personal computer creators were educated in C and UNIX, and they choose BASIC because it's easier to learn and implement than C - less memory used -... If you wanted something simpler, you had Forth at hand :-), like in the Jupiter ACE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_ACE.

MS-DOS, like other early commercial OSes for home computers, were first implemented in assembly - like UNIX itself -, but after a short time most of these OSes where re-implemented in C... Apple OS was an exception.

Dennis Ritchie made the house with good foundations, and Jobs - and Microsoft - made it beautiful to sell it.

Jobs was a good salesman, who knew what to do to sell existing good ideas. Ritchie was one of the men that created ideas... This is the reason that makes me really sad because of Ritchie's dead, but Job's dead only makes me to show respect.

...wow. I didn't think that even Stallman would sink so low as to exploit someone's death for a PR stunt. Then again, I doubt he'll be the last - after Apple cynically exploited George Harrison's death for a marketing attention-grab, you can be DAMN sure they'll eventually do the same with Jobs' death.

Dennis Ritchie's contributions are arguably more important but Job's. Rictchie's belong to the world while Job's belong to Apple. Job's stood on Ritchie's shoulders the whole time... and Ritchie will get just a tiny fraction of the publicity that Job's is getting.

I do have great respect for Ritchie and his death is very unfortunate and I mourn him.
I am not a fan of Apple but I found Steve Job's death very shocking because he was 56 and he died of cancer.
Ritchies' death is unfortunate but at 70, it's still too early but it is expectable. He could have lived some more years but 70 is reasonable.
But nobody should die at 56 in my opinion.

That's too easy. Ritchie and Thompson made a great operating system, that was only used in the confines of some universities and companies. Berkeley (BSD), Sun (Solaris), and later Linux and Apple (yes, Apple) brought UNIX to great heights. Without those other players, UNIX would probably be fairly obscure.

Jobs and Ritchie deserve equal respect. Ritchie for making a great operating system, jobs for making computers (the original Mac), smartphones, and tablets that don't suck. Which had a great impact on the lifestyles of a lot of people.

That's too easy. Ritchie and Thompson made a great operating system, that was only used in the confines of some universities and companies. Berkeley (BSD), Sun (Solaris), and later Linux and Apple (yes, Apple) brought UNIX to great heights. Without those other players, UNIX would probably be fairly obscure.

Not sure I agree with you. Unix was in heavy use running the internet before Apple switched to BSD. You may be right about Solaris and the other flavors of BSD, but at least someone can stand on Ritchie's shoulders without getting sued. You can get sued just for looking at Job's shoulders.

Don't forget that Ritchie was the co-creator of C as well. What is Windows written in? He had profound influence on any operating system that isn't a toy. And most of the toy OS's that aren't written in C are running on some Java or .NET VM implemented in C.

BTW... You don't need to go and point me to some OS written entirely in assembly OS or some self-hosting language... I'm sure they exist too.

The more-unix-than-unix Plan 9 and later Inferno OSes, mostly. I've never really used either, but they're interesting research projects; taking the unix "everything is a file"-idea much further and generally aiming for some extreme network transparency.

Yes I felt sad because of Steve Job's death but I'm feeling lot sad because of Sir Dennis Ritchie's death. I learned 'C' language reading his books. I taught 'C' to many students and earned money and respect.
I definitely owe him. RIP sir.

... I admired the man in true sense whose profound legacy lamented every field in computer technology...A moving tribute to Denis M Richie, we all build our success on his hard work a real foundation, an indeed mountainous achievement by Denis; remain permanent outpost for every new comer, developer and computer technology enthusiast. HE the MAN who shown the inner working. He will be always be Hello ....

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{

printf("\033[2J\033[;H"); /* Clear the screen */

printf("\nHello World -- by D M Richie\n\n");
printf("Your legacy remain radiant, an emanating lights for those\n");
printf("New and Young developer and an old timers those pass through\");
printf("your ERA - Denis M Richie.\n\n");

I still get that tickle when I first used C and Unix. I had already used Algol60/Pascal/BCPL but C gave "all" of the machine back to the programmer, here it is, use it to do what you want. Want to throw in asm, no problem, freedom to push the pedal to the max. Even self modifying code (in asm) thrilled me.

Alas those freedoms led to its shortcomings too, but security and viruses were not on our minds then, we trusted fellow computer folks.

I still appreciate the terseness too, choose your own style. Even working on C compilers (LCC) has been fun.

Thank you Dennis

Also lets not forget that many of the giants of the 60s and 70s have been passing or will soon enough. I wonder if Knuth will ever finish his life work on Art of ... or what Wirth is up to today.

This afternoon I told my fellow engineers in the UNIX, Linux and SAN engineering department that Dennis Richie had died at age 70 and most of my co-workers had no idea who I was talking about. That sucks!

Dennis Richie has had an incalculable impact on our world. Without him, this site would not exist.

As a society we grow, improve, and adapt. A society is made of biological organisms and as such has the characteristics of any individual biological organism. Just as biological organisms adapt to their environment, a society adapts, but not as a result of the environment that forces adaptation of it's biological components. Instead a society adapts by the will of it's components. The will of special forward thinking individuals drive society forward. These individuals improve how we live our lives every day. They make it easier to accomplish tasks, make it easier to build enterprises, enable better health care, and improve the quality of, not only our short existence on this planet, but the short existence of all future generations.

Above all else, there is one feat of society that is remarkably powerful and aids the progression of that society in more ways than any other single characteristic. Without the development of language, we would have no collaboration, we would have no healthcare system, we would have no transference of information to the next generation to continue our work. Language is the network of society.

Dr. Dennis Ritchie has died. Dr. Dennis Ritchie contributed to society the most powerful contribution anyone can make to a society: language. Dr. Ritchie's language was a progressive language and not a language spoken by people, but a language used by the aids of people; Dr. Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language that is the basis for all computing today.

There is no technology any of us can practically use that does not exist because of the work contributed by Dr. Ritchie. The motivation of Dr.Ritchie was the progression of our society. The result is a tool that enables both individual progression and society progression without compromise. The C programing language was, among other reasons, designed to enable software to be easily portable across computer platforms. The Unix operating system, as an example, for which he was the primary developer, was able to be ported to every computer platform due to his language.

Our society exists as it exists thanks in great part to Dr. Dennis Ritchie.

- I would compare Mother Theresa with Paris Hilton
- I would compare Justin Bieber with John Lennon
- I would compare Mobutu Sese Seko with Gandhi
- I would compare Joseph Stalin with Winston Churcill
- I would compare Dubya with FDR
- I would compare Andy Warhol with Vincent van Gogh
- I would compare Eddie Murphy with Morgan Freeman
- I would compare Rob Schneider with Robert de Niro
- I would compare Twilight's author with Shakespeare
- I would compare Steve Jobs with Dennis Ritchie